Windows XP jacked up my partition!

Folks,

I've got a dire problem. I have a machine that had a brand new Western Digital 200 GB IDE HD that had 2 seperate FAT32 partitions on it. This thing is brand new, and I used it to back up all of my digital photos, movies, documents, etc... from my laptop. Anyhow, I recently got another machine that is running Windows XP. I took my secondary WD 200 GB harddrive from my old machine, put it in as a slave on Windows XP and as Windows XP was booting up, it looked like it was going to do a SCANDISK on the new partitions. I didn't get a chance to see what it said, but it automatically proceeded to Fix Bad Crosslinks #...#'s without giving me the option. It just ran! After quite some time, It finished fixing all of the bad crosslinks, and then as Windows XP came up, I looked for my partitions on the WD drive and they were there, but none of the files are there! In Windows Explorer I can see that the drive is being 80% utilized, but NOTHING is there. It looks like Windows XP totally ******* up the pointers in the file allocation tables. Why does it do that??? I'm so ****** off! I talked to a few other people that work at the datacenter here, and they had the same thing happen to them going from Windows 2000 to XP. Did anyone else see this before? Can I call Microsoft and bitch them out and get some kind of compensation? I lost a lot of important stuff on these drives.

 

I did more poking around and changed the folder options to show operating system files, now I see a folder called FOUND.001 which contains a bunch of .chk files. Any ideas on how to recover these?

Thanks

 

Hey Christer,

Thanks for the reply. I will check on the other machine for the scandisk.log file and look into it. Right now, i'm doing a sector by sector dump of that entire disk before I touch it our mess around with it. I discovered that only one out of the two partitions are bad, and that the other partition is okay. I did find some utilities that attempt at doing FAT32 .CHK file recoveries. I will run these tools after I have the backup which is going on right now.

Much thanks for your help!

 

Chkdsk (and scandisk) are both very dangerous tools. I always decline letting them run unless I first do a full backup image of my drive. If I am initiating the run, I never invoke the /r or /f switch, just run it without any switch. It's safe that way and will report if it wants to "Fix" something. When it does that, I run a full backup first, then go with the /r switch. I have learned that the hard way and trusted that letting it run would somehow do as it implies, fix something. It "fixes" nothing. Although it normally works fine, it can completely corrupt all of your data. I have had that happen twice for no apparent reason. It has made me very alert and quick to select the cancel option that is always offered. If you are too slow and don't get it cancelled soon enough, just hit the power switch and shut down!

I realize that doesn't help you but it may alert someone else. Generally when I give this advice, several people come back to say it's a safe utility and they don't believe what I say. I'll bet you do though. Some people even say that my drive was probably bad anyway. Well, how come it was booting before it got "Fixed" and wouldn't after?

As far as putting those .chk files to use, I have never known of anyone who had that ability. I have never seen any MS articles on how to do it either. I'm sorry I can't be more optimistic, but if you don't have backups, you're probably up the creek. You might try a bit by bit image such as True Image or Ghost makes and then see if you can selectively pick files from the archive for recovery.

Good luck.

 

Ah, I looked for the chkdsk log file on the original Win XP machine and found it in the Event Viewer. The message is actually:

bad links in lost chain at cluster

I've found more information on the Net:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group...ain+at+cluster"&rnum=1&hl=en#5fa4d6835d64205e

This one in particular has been useful. I'm going to try some of the suggested software. Aw, man... i've been SOOOO bummed out today! I'm going to buy a dual layer external DVD burner and just burn all my junk from now on to DVD's. Unless you guys tell me there are problems with fallibility with DVD RW burners, ofcourse.

 

Is there a possibility of Drive letter changing going on here ?

Like maybe it was D: in the other machine and E: in the new ? Or maybe the other way around ?

I think something like this you might get awy with in 98 ( and I have ) but XP ??

Or. Looking back at the quote above, were the two OSs the same ?

BillyBob

 

I know he is angry. I would be too.

I would not put all the blame on Windows XP just yet. Cause I think the User may have played a part in this too.

That is what raised my question.

I ALMOST DID. And I would not call MS until I were sure that it was thier fault. They did not take the device from one machine to the other.

It may not read like it but that is what I am thinking too.

BillyBob

 

I am not sure if this will help you recover your drive but there is a small program called "testdisk" that allows one to recover messerd up partition tables on hard drives. A friend of mine could not see any files on his slave hard drive after a system crash caused by some file copying. Using this program allowed me to restore his partition table and thus saving all his files.

 

2 cents

Respectfully disagree with Arie's opinion, which, I feel. may be based on M$ marketing rather than scientific evidence. I too have been moving HDDs between computers for just about 20 years and have not encountered anything like the present problem, but of course most of those disks were small by todays standards. I have moved a couple in the 120GB range recently and they were FAT32, one with a single 120GB partition! (the user made it!).

I have seen too many problems caused by XP and blamed on other software.

Re: data storage, the large IT departments that rely on magnetic storage NEVER rely on a single mode such as a very large HDD; they do backups of backups relying on the hope that if one tape or disk fails the rest may survive. For a single user, that's impractical, so I use optical storage - CDs and DVDs, which are VERY unlikely to fail if properly cared for, and easy to make multiple copies too.

 

Hi Sparrow,

Have to agree with Arie on this. From all my reading and experience, overall, an NTFS volume will develop less problems over time.

Certainly agree with that.

I don't like HD's larger than 80GB. All too tempting to put your "eggs" in one basket. If more space needed, get two or more smaller ones - real easy to have multiple HD's both internal and external. I have a few apps that are critical to my work, and the data is backed up both to external HD's and DVD's.

Regards - Charles

 

Getting back to the problem, I'm wondering if the drive was moved to a computer that had not been fully updated and did not support large drives (over 137 gig). Just a thought. Probably not likely, given it is split down to smaller partitions. Also I think that support came with SP1.

Along that line, perhaps this is a BIOS problem causing the drive to not be fully recognized. That could seemingly confuse chkdsk but I have nothing to support that.

It certainly wouldn't hurt to put it back from whence it came before doing much repair or recovery on it.

 

There are pros and cons for both fat and ntfs, as noted by M$ here. The pros for ntfs apply to large corporations, IMO, and the cons effect individual users. Each file system has it's place; to make a statement that all computers would be better off using one or the other is patently wrong according to M$. In my experience, ntfs has caused trouble for users, primarily because of it's secrecy, which has no place on a personal computer.

 

Hi Sparrow,

Sure there are pro's and con's.

I have a mixture of file formats, the NTFS volumes don't fragment to the extent that FAT32 volumes is one pro, can't think of a con at the moment; this applies to my experience and environment.

secrecy, which has no place on a personal computer.
Not clear on why you find that objectionable, a personal computer is a personal computer. In any case, taking advantage of NTFS security/secrecy has to be implemted, and can't be fully realized w/o running XP PRO - created for businesses.

Regards - Charles